I’m still excited from Bad Bunny’s halftime show at Sunday’s Super Bowl. I don’t speak Spanish, and I didn’t understand most of the lyrics, but the rhythm and movement communicated something deeper than words. The opening scenes in the sugar cane fields, followed by the vibrant fruit and colors of Puerto Rico, were not just visually stunning; they told a story of place, people, and memory. It was a reminder that culture often speaks truths that language alone cannot. Marilyn and I will visit the island later this year, and Julio Peña has already promised to share places where that memory still lives.
There is a belief in Puerto Rico that a person dies twice, once in the body and again when they are no longer remembered. In response, there is a deep practice of naming the dead. This belief echoes traditions such as Día de los Muertos in Mexican culture. For Puerto Ricans, naming the dead is a way of keeping them alive within family and community.
I find a connection between this practice and the purpose of Black History Month. What we now observe each February began as Negro History Week, established in 1926 by historian Carter G. Woodson. The second week of February was chosen to honor the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, both born during that week.
From the beginning, Woodson held a clear and demanding vision. “We should emphasize not Negro History,” he said, “but the Negro in History.” As the son of formerly enslaved parents, Woodson understood that when history is not named, it is erased. When we fail to remember ancestors and their achievements, we quietly diminish what people believe they are capable of becoming and doing. When Black people are ignored or removed from the story of the United States, their potential is constrained, and, as Langston Hughes wrote, hope becomes a “dream deferred that dries up like a raisin in the sun.”
In The Mis-Education of the Negro, Woodson argues that an education system shaped by oppression accomplishes two things at once: it convinces the dominant culture of its own superiority, while quietly teaching Black people to doubt their worth, creativity, and potential. Black History Month offers us an opportunity to resist that distortion, to see Black people fully and truthfully in history, and to recognize the deep connections among Afro-Caribbean cultures expressed through music, song, and dance.
To name the dead is an act of resistance. It is a refusal to allow oppression to have the final word by erasing lives, stories, and contributions that have shaped this nation. Black History Month gives us the chance to reclaim memory so that dignity, possibility, and hope remain alive in the present. When we remember Black people in history, memory itself becomes a form of witness, declaring that what God has brought into being will not be forgotten, and that the dream will not be allowed to dry up in the sun.
Rev. Dr. Craig Howard
